Free Republic

Rochester, N.Y. (WHAM) — It's not even Memorial Day weekend, and Ontario Beach Park in Charlotte has already had two brawls this season. A witness who provided videos of two fights, which happened Sunday and Monday, said it was many of the same people both times. Parents at the nearby playgrounds grabbed their children and fled the scene. The witness estimated that some 200-300 people started running away from the fray. Tom Beaman Jr., owner of California Rollin’ II at the Port of Rochester, said the fights are concerning, and it's way too early in the season for them to...

ALBANY - Activist and comedian Dick Gregory said yesterday he suspects CIA and FBI "thugs" had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Gregory told the New York State Black and Puerto Rican Legislators annual conference that bits of evidence overlooked by most of the mainstream media show some people in power had knowledge of the attacks beforehand. "You all sit around and really believe that some little snot-nosed punky Arabs could pull off something ... the Russians in their heyday ... didn't have the intelligence to come into the country and blow up a building like these...

Despite a growing storm of criticism, including from members of her own party, the San Antonio Democrat insists she’s not antisemitic.Controversy-tarred congressional candidate Maureen Galindo this week pledged to transform a site south of San Antonio now used by the Trump administration to detain migrants into an internment camp for “American Zionists.” “She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” Galindo wrote in an Instagram post over the weekend, referring to herself in the third person. “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably...

INTRODUCTION On April 29, 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders convened a 75-minute panel in the US Capitol on “the existential threat of AI.” Two of the four panelists were Chinese government affiliates: Zeng Yi, Dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, and Xue Lan, a Tsinghua University professor who chairs China’s national AI governance expert committee and serves as a Counsellor of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. From a US Senate platform, Xue called the US-China AI race “an inaccurate narrative” and argued for “safe zones” of cooperation on AI safety. The event was...

A federal appellate court ruled that New York’s law banning firearms carrying under a so-called “vampire rule” violated the Second Amendment. Shortly after the Supreme Court struck down New York’s discretionary system for issuing concealed carry permits, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation enacting numerous restrictions on carrying firearms after convening a special session of the state Legislature. A majority of the three-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that a provision requiring private property owners to post signs allowing concealed carry was unconstitutional. FPC WIN! The Second Circuit has struck...

A major data breach has compromised the personal information of at least 1.8 million patients. Hackers spent months inside the healthcare network between November last year and February, quietly copying highly sensitive files from its systems before the intrusion was discovered. The stolen data reportedly includes medical records, payment information, government identification numbers and even fingerprint scans that victims cannot replace. Officials later revealed the attack targeted NYC Health and Hospitals (NYCHHC), the largest public health system in the US, which serves more than one million patients. According to the organization, the breach appears to have originated through a compromised...

Is it just me, or does it feel like we're setting up to let this guy go free? The latest update in the Luigi Mangione case is a pretty discouraging one. Officers apparently did not follow protocol when they searched Luigi's backpack at the McDonald's where he was arrested. So nothing from the backpack can be admitted as evidence. BREAKING: Judge Carro just ruled the McDonald's backpack search ILLEGAL in the Luigi Mangione case: "There wasn't a search warrant at that time.""So it's the bullet magazine his cell phone, his passport, his wallet, and a computer chip will not be...

More Iranian militia types are in the news, sad to say. Even worse, they're not doing their thing on their home turf - they're in the export business. Breaking News: An Iran-backed militia commander was arrested and charged with plotting to attack Jewish sites in the U.S., including one in New York. Prosecutors say he is a leader of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia with ties to Iran. https://t.co/5FyiNgseXk— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 15, 2026Iran-backed Iraqi terrorists Kata’ib Hezbollah are reportedly seeking negotiations with the Iraqi government for the release of kidnapped American journalist Shelly Kittleson.The group is...

A New York man was convicted Wednesday of helping operate a secret Chinese government-linked police station in Manhattan used to monitor dissidents, federal prosecutors said. Lu Jianwang, 64, a U.S. citizen also known as "Harry Lu" from the Bronx, was convicted by a jury on two counts related to operating an overseas police station in New York City on behalf of China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), as well as obstruction of justice for destroying evidence. According to prosecutors, Lu and his co-defendant, Chen Jinping, acted as illegal agents of the Chinese government beginning in 2022 and established what authorities...

Key FactsNew York lawmakers are planning the tax, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the state budget negotiations who noted the proposal would be levied at 1% of the buying price and be paid by buyers. The legislators are also considering expanding the tax to $1 million or more cash purchases in the state that would incorporate the suburbs and upstate New York, Bloomberg added. The tax in New York City alone could generate up to $160 million, according to the unnamed sources Bloomberg cited. A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., told Bloomberg she “announced a general agreement...

A controversial new tax on second homes in New York City was quietly lowered from $5 million to a “market value” of $1 million — increasing the number of homeowners who will get squeezed as part of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s never-ending budget negotiations. Hochul’s office finally released details of her and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new tax on second homes in New York City to the New York Times Thursday, the latest concession to the Democratic socialist mayor and his liberal followers on a tax-hike crusade they say will target the rich. The so-called “pied-a-terre” tax would apply to second homes...

The ink isn’t even dry on New York City’s proposed pied-à-terre tax — and one Miami Beach tower is already counting the money. At the Perigon Miami Beach, a 72-unit oceanfront condominium in Mid-Beach designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, developers say they logged more than $70 million in sales from New York buyers in the 30 days after the building reached its full structural height in early March. The project, developed by Mast Capital, is priced from $12.55 million and expects to open in 2027. It is no coincidence, on April 15, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and...

Defendant Allegedly Attempted to Defraud the New York City Campaign Finance Board of $1 Million in Public Matching Funds Earlier today in federal court in Brooklyn, a criminal complaint was unsealed charging Angela Aquino, a 2025 candidate for New York City Public Advocate, with wire fraud in connection with her scheme to defraud New York City’s campaign finance system to obtain public matching funds. Aquino was arrested today and is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon by United States Magistrate Judge Clay H. Kaminsky. Joseph Nocella, Jr., United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York; Nadia I. Shihata,...

The adult son of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) launched a vile antisemitic and homophobic tirade at Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) at a DC bar Tuesday night, saying at one point that the Iran war was “about the gays and the Jews, and I hate them both, and I don’t care if they die.” In a phone conversation recounting the evening, Lawler told The Post that he was sitting at a popular DC bar with a friend and a reporter for NOTUS, which first revealed the incident involving William Paul. “So Rand Paul’s f—ing son is sitting next to us at...

Like many leftists living in social media bubbles, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof is obsessed with Israel. And because he has a risible understanding of the Middle East, he’s also highly susceptible to believing unhinged conspiracies aimed at the country. This week, however, in a pseudo-journalistic piece headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” the columnist excavates conspiracies so unhinged that no marginally reputable media outlet has ever touched them. Even the New York Times relegates it to its op-ed section, since the piece breaks every rule of objective journalism. But even columnists have an obligation...

Secret new assessments say Iran has operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting that its military remains far stronger than President Trump has asserted. The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities. Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33...

Has Ithaca gone to the dogs? A new memoir calls the Upstate New York city the “most depressing college town in America.” Isabel Klee, a New Jersey native, has risen to social media fame through documenting her work rehabilitating medically complex and severely neglected rescue dogs — and showing their transformation from timid, shut-down animals into happy, thriving pets. Klee’s new memoir, “Dogs, Boys and Other Things I’ve Cried About,” chronicles her coming-of-age years after high school and her early experiences living in New York City, but it also includes a blunt look back at her short-lived college experience in...

And even Kristof himself admits that “it’s impossible to know how common sexual assaults against Palestinians are” -- though that does not stop him from going on about it for almost 4,000 words. It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views on the Middle East conflict, we should all be able to agree that dogs cannot be trained to rape human beings. Yet this is exactly what a New York Times “opinion” piece posing as an in-depth journalistic investigation, perhaps to avoid any real journalistic accountability, published on Monday claims, based on anonymous testimonies and a report by a well-known anti-Israel...

A New York woman who refused to cooperate with prosecutors after a mental patient attacked her on the subway weeks before he pushed a retired NYC teacher to his death appears to have some serious regrets. “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail,” the unidentified 23-year-old told the New York Post over the weekend. Now, however, she is saying, “I regret it 100 percent and feel really bad that a man lost his life.” The woman recounted to the tabloid the terrifying subway attack she suffered at the hands...

‘My ambition is to change the country,’ AOC says when asked about seeking higher office in 2028 New York’s Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brushed off question about run for presidency.